A Kriyā, says Wikipedia, is most commonly understood as “a ‘completed action’, technique or practice within a yoga discipline meant to achieve a specific result. Another meaning of Kriya is an outward physical manifestation of awakened kundalini, such as a spontaneous body movement related to Kundalini energy flow.” As a poet, I love reading Myers’ kriya as a text to recite – or rather, to embreath – again and again. Myers’ text can be read as a set of ideovocal poses to flow through, as idea moving in and out through the lungs, as language as transformative breathing practice.

Anyone who has ever had someone say the right thing in the right way at the right time, such that their body responded, can understand the power of intention and language combined.

Anyone who is familiar with this blog can vibe with Myers’ assertion that a vocalized practice can lead us into, or away from, an idea of a self as like “one giant nerve cell merging with soil.”

Myers’ “invitation to deepen your already multispecies Yoga practice” blends theories of affective ecology with research on plant science. If only it were fashionable in lit circles to discuss the breath and poetry and Eastern philosophy from a postcolonial perspective: there was good reason why poetry discourse moved on from that (the awkwardness of white, Western North American poets of the 60s and 70s wanting to be non-brown yogic sage-shamans, for one).

But if one perhaps starts with the acknowledgement that these South Asian thinkers knew something then that we want to know again, now, in our time – we can think simultaneously about what bodies inhabit the most authoritative spaces of thought production and wonder how the affect/interspecies wisdom we’re turning to Eastern thought to express irrupts back into Western thought at the site of the idea of the plant.